Research Findings: Empathy plays an important role in children's early social-emotional development. However, there are not many instruments available for measuring the different aspects/levels of empathy in preschool children. Moreover, few studies examined the validity of the existing measures for empathy in Chinese children. The present study…

Parents' cultural beliefs are associated with their children's socialization and development. Researchers have examined these associations through the lens of parents' ethnotheories, which refer to parents' implicit beliefs about children's developmentally appropriate behavior. In contrast to prior work focused on parents' ethnotheories of…

Studies have shown that there are differences between the presentations of males and females diagnosed with autism. There remains a developing understanding about how the presentation of autism differs between boys (hereafter referred to as 'assigned males at birth') and girls (assigned females at birth). This study sought to investigate the…

Little is currently known about the autism spectrum disorder (ASD)-related difficulties of females narrowly below the ASD diagnostic threshold and whether the disorder conceptualisation should be broadened to capture their presentations. We extracted fine-grained information from the assessment reports of 222 children who were either diagnosed…

The aim of this study was to assess the pattern of mutual relations within the Problematic Smartphone Use (PSU) (first network) and between adolescent mental health problems and PSU (second network). The invariance of both networks was investigated across age, gender, and severity of symptoms. The participants were 708 Romanian adolescents…

Background: Studies have found that presence of challenging behaviours and mental health problems limits employment for people with intellectual disabilities. This study investigates the associations between age, gender, living condition, level of intellectual disability, diagnoses, behaviour, mental health, and employment in adults with…

The association between the quality of teacher-student relationships and children's psychological adjustment has been mainly studied in Western countries; however, this research topic is gaining more interest in Eastern countries. Based on attachment theory and empirical evidence, this cross-sectional study examined the relationship between…

Across all cultures, parents have intuitive ideas ("ethnotheories") of what undesirable child characteristics are as well as how to explain them. Yet there have been relatively few cross-cultural comparisons of parents' ethnotheories about the nature and causes of child misbehavior. 108 mothers of 5-year-old children from the United…

Research on the effects of nursery school attendance still presents divergent results: a possible explanation is that the effects of child care on development outcomes can be modulated by individual characteristics, such as gender or temperament. In the present study, gender differences in nursery adaptation (evaluated by social skills and…

Studies on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on autistic children's psychosocial outcomes have shown mixed results. In the current study we aimed to gain a better insight into the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic by comparing psychosocial outcomes collected pre-pandemic with data collected during the pandemic. We used the Strengths and…

Although existing studies have found that problematic parental behaviors affect children's later life course outcomes, few have focused on the gender and urban-rural differences in the effects of these behaviors on school-to-work transition. This study traces the school-to-work trajectories of Chinese people born between 1930 and 1979 to…

The increasing usage of social media has sparked interest in identifying characteristics that contribute to problematic social media use (PSMU). Using the Interaction Person-Affect-Cognition-Execution (I-PACE) model, the current study analyzes whether fear of missing out (FoMO) and dissociative experiences affect the link between trait emotional…

Sense of coherence (SOC) is a relevant contributor and predictor of the individuals' mental and physical health. There are a number of studies about SOC, but only two validation articles of the sense of coherence scale (SOCS) were found on adolescents and none on children. The aim of this research was to validate the SOC scale in youth under 18.…

This study aimed to explore the prevalence of challenging behaviors (CBs) associated with students with severe developmental disabilities (SDDs) as rated by their teachers. The study also attempted to examine whether the occurrence and intensity of CBs might depend on certain socio-demographic variables. Data was collected using a questionnaire to…

Acknowledging that the parent-child attachment is a dyadic relationship, we investigated differences between pairs of parents and preschool children based on gender configurations in the association between attachment and problem behavior. We looked at mother-daughter, mother-son, father-daughter, and father-son dyads, but also compared mothers…